[I've been doing a series of Let's Play videos exploring old adventures, text games and lost design forms from the 1980s Apple IIe and Commodore 64 era. In a time when young men shout over new action games, I will talk softly over strange old ones. Come along on a visitation of a different era that's one part meditations on my childhood, one part adventure game criticism, and one part preservation effort. Bonus: Everyone says the quiet talk, lo-fi handmade feel and keyboard tapping triggers ASMR responses. Please enjoy>!]

Like Sirius Software’s Gruds in Space, the same company’s Critical Mass was one of my main childhood demons — absorbing, unsolvable, inspiring. Time is a factor in this game, and each move causes it to pass — taking planes to new places can eat up great swathes of it. When the time is up, a bomb goes off. I didn’t know exactly who I was or why I was traveling the world, fearing the great animated nuclear mushroom cloud that would eventually destroy the world if I took too long, but I loved doing it.

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Critical Mass, the three-dimensional match-4 game that Brendan so exhaustively discussed a couple of weeks back, now has a demo. That is all. Move on. Go.